Morning Links: Empty Apologia Edition

At a $415.8 million Christie’s Impressionist and modern art sale last night in New York, new records were achieved for Kazimir Malevich and Constantin Brancusi. The sale was a success, even without Steve Wynn’s Picassos, which were withdrawn earlier this week. [ARTnews]

Guards at Beijing’s 798 Art District reportedly beat two women who were wearing pins in support of LGBTQI rights. An Art District staff member defended the guards’ choice, noting that the district’s management has “the right to stop illegal activity.” [The Art Newspaper]

The first reviews are coming out for Lars von Trier’s latest provocation, The House That Jack Built, a graphically violent film about a serial killer that reportedly caused 100 people to walk out when it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. In his review for the Village Voice, Bilge Ebiri calls the film an “empty apologia” for some of von Trier’s more controversial antics. [The Village Voice]

Architecture

The Royal Academy of Art in London has unveiled a new design that connects its two buildings. Though it seems minimal, it wasn’t an easy overhaul, the architect David Chipperfield, who oversaw the addition, said, because “it depended on territorial negotiations and the reorganizations of emotional things.” [Artnet News]

Remembering

For the New Yorker, Louis Menand muses on the writings of Tom Wolfe, the author of such acclaimed books as The Painted Word, who died earlier this week at age 88. “A great magazine writer is a writer who sells magazines,” Menand writes. “Tom Wolfe sold magazines.” [The New Yorker]

The Dallas Museum of Art is planning an exhibition devoted to the work of Ida Ten Eyck O’Keeffe, the younger sister of the more famous Georgia O’Keeffe. Aptly, the show is subtitled “Escaping Georgia’s Shadow.” [Dallas News]

The Dutch dealer Jan Six has discovered the first “new” Rembrandt painting in years. It will now go on view at the Hermitage Museum in Amsterdam for a month. [Reuters]

Update, 11 p.m.: An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated that a newly discovered Rembrandt is now on view at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. It is, instead, on view at the museum’s Amsterdam branch.